Campus News

Jeff Polish, founder of The Monti, an organization whose mission is to create community through storytelling, talks about "Shaping Meaningful Events into Memorable Stories" at the first workshop of the "Telling My Story" series held last month in the Hadley Village Common Room. Photo: Douglas Levere

By HALEY CASE

“Having a good presence online can really help to give students an advantage over other candidates.”

Jenna Smith, coordinator of assessment and marketing

Career Services

It’s not your parent’s job search anymore.

Career Services has begun a pilot program emphasizing the
importance of digital media literacy in the modern day job search
for UB students approaching graduation.

“At Career Services, we work directly with employers, and
one thing that is constantly a hot-button topic is the increasing
importance of digital media literacy in the hiring process,”
says Jenna Smith, coordinator of assessment and marketing at Career
Services.

Students hunting for a job need to recognize a new
job-application reality: Employers consider much more than how the
applicants looks on paper.

“In the past, it was just the resume and cover letter that
employers were looking at,” says Smith. “But now they
will Google applicants and look at their LinkedIn page, Twitter and
Instagram accounts. So having a good presence online can really
help to give students an advantage over other
candidates.”

As the Internet reaches further into people’s lives, a
potential employer can learn nearly everything about prospective
employees before they even walk into the interview.

With this in mind, Career Services collaborated with the Center
for Education Innovation and the Department of Communication to
develop “Telling My Story,” a series of six workshops,
each focusing on a different aspect of digital communication and
storytelling. Fifteen students from a variety of disciplines and
chosen by faculty are taking part in the workshops.

Workshops are led by presenters who showcases an area of their
expertise that they believe will be useful to students looking to
make themselves more engaging to potential employers.

Following the workshop series, students and facilitators will
return for a final session in which participants share their
stories in a recorded TED Talk-type presentation.

Workshop sessions tackle such topics as the power of narrative,
public speaking, creating effective images and producing successful
videos.

A session on the principles of social media-based communication
is being led by Michael Stefanone, associate professor of
communication.

“My presentation will focus on the technological
differences between social media platforms, audience issues and
other communication-related issues effective storytellers should
consider,” says Stefanone. “I think this program is
valuable for students because there aren’t any classes or
programs like this one ‘on the books’ here at
UB.”

Career Services officials have heard of numerous examples of
applicants not getting hired, in part due to an unprofessional or
inappropriate social media presence. Using the same reasoning,
employers say a professional-looking social media profile can
actually be an asset for an applicant and help them stand out.

Students need to understand that if something on social media is
out there for friends to see, it’s also out there and visible
for employers.

“What we are hoping to do in this project is demonstrate
to students that having some advanced skills in the areas of
digital and social media could be a great benefit to them when
searching for employment,” says John Wild, interim associate
director for the Center for Educational Innovation, who came up
with the original idea for the project.

“All businesses today are involved with digital and social
media in some way,” Wild says. “Having advanced
knowledge and skills in these areas to add to a resume or talk
confidently about in a job interview can help raise an
applicant’s value to an employer.”

The project team says the goal of the program is to give
students a good grasp of how to present the story of who they are
to an employer — in a digital way. Students can do this by
producing a short video and/or a collection of photos, using a
social media site creatively, or simply giving a talk and using
some digital materials to highlight their narrative.

The team hopes to learn from the program and eventually expand
on it to emphasize the importance of digital media literacy to all
UB students starting the job search.